Jesus as the Son of God

I have a friend who grew up with a different understanding of Jesus than I. She does not practice that understanding any longer, and is on a journey, I believe, into a exciting relationship with Jesus. To do this, she has to unlearn the beliefs of her youth, learn a new understanding of Jesus and explore that new understanding of Jesus in the context of a fresh reading of the New Testament. It’s not easy, but I am so proud of her.

Recently, we were talking about Jesus and she noted that it could be hard for a person to get their mind around the God-ness of Jesus when he is called the “Son of God.” I was a bit taken back, because I personally had never stopped to consider that before. I tried to provide an answer but it was not to my satisfaction. Quite honestly, I was probably making something up. So that afternoon I started hunting for an answer, one that I myself could understand but also one that I could communicate to someone who had not grown up with my belief system.

I admit to being a N.T. Wright homer…I really like his work. I don’t agree with all of it, but I agree with a lot of it. I knew that I could not go to his dense volumes on Jesus if I was going to effectively explain this title, so I first went to his book on why Christianity matters called Simply Christian. He has a couple of pages on the divinity of Jesus in there, but they could be confusing as well. So I kept looking.

Recently, I was reading Wright’s new book Simply Jesus and he gave a fabulous explanation of the term and its history. Wright is one of the few authors who can handle the scriptures with the depth of a scholar but also make it easy to understand for the masses. This is why I so appreciate him.

Of the term “Son of God,” he states:

Under Julius Caesar all that changed [how Rome would be ruled]. “Caesar” was simply his family name, but Julius made it a royal title from that day on (the words “Kaiser” and “Tsar” are variations on “Caesar”). A great military hero out on the frontiers, he did the unthinkable: he brought his army back to Rome itself and established his own power and prestige there. It seems that he even allowed people to think he was divine.

The traditionalists were furious, and they assassinated him. But this threw Rome into a long and bloody civil war from which one winner emerged, Caesar’s adopted son, Octavian. He took the title “Augustus,” which means “majestic” or “worthy of honor.” This, along with “Caesar,” became the name or title of his successors as well. He declared that his adoptive father, Julius, had indeed become divine; this meant that he, Augustus Octavian Caesar, was now officially “son of god,” “son of the divine Julius.” If you’d asked anybody in the Roman Empire, from Germany to Egypt, from Spain to Syria, who the “son of god” might be, the obvious answer, the politically correct answer, would have been “Octavian.”

Augustus ruled the Roman world, an increasingly massive empire, from 31 BC to AD 14. After his death, he too was divinized, and his successor, Tiberius, took the same titles.

The job of a Roman governor in a place like Jerusalem was to keep the peace, to administer justice, to collect the taxes, and particularly to suppress unrest. After all, as the propaganda insisted, the rule of Caesar, the Roman “son of god,” was the “good news” that had brought blessings and benefits to the whole world. Surely, once the locals saw what blessings Rome was so generously offering, they would happily come into line? Could it really be that difficult to win over their hearts and minds to the great ideals of the empire to the west?

So the world thought of Caesar as the “son of god,” as divine. By applying that term to Jesus, the gospel writers were making a statement about the authority, power and position of Jesus over and against the authority, power and position of the current ruler of the civilized world. Jesus was more powerful than caesar; in fact, he was all powerful. This was not a title expressing the belief that Jesus was less than God and simply God’s son, but a title indicating he was in fact greater than the greatest ruler the world knew at the time. It was an affront to the authority of Caesar.

Sometimes we need an outsider to help us learn more about our own faith. Hopefully this helps anyone wondering the meaning of that title given to Jesus.